You're eligible to collect Social Security at age 62, but that's not always the best time to start taking it. You'll be penalized for taking Social Security before your full retirement age (66 or 67) and you can earn an even larger benefit if you wait until age 70 to start collecting.
When Can You File for Social Security?
The earliest you can apply for Social Security benefits is at age 61 and nine months, and you can expect to receive your first payment four months later—the month after your birthday. Typically, Social Security benefits are paid the month after they are due or must be specified.
For example, if you turn 62 on Dec. 15, then your first full month of eligibility is January, and your payment for that month will arrive in February. If you have already reached age 62 and met all other eligibility criteria, then you may begin collecting benefits in the same month as you apply if you specify, although your first payment still would not arrive until the following month.
Key Takeaway
- You're eligible for Social Security at age 62, but you'll pay a penalty for not waiting until your full retirement age to begin collecting.
- You can boost your benefits by waiting until you're past your full retirement age to apply, and can continue to get a boost for every year you delay up until age 70.
- The youngest age when you can apply is 61 years and nine months old.
- While it typically takes several weeks to process a new application, some may be approved in the same month in which you apply.
Should I Wait Until Full Retirement Age to Apply for Social Security?
Receiving Social Security at age 62 means that you will receive a reduced payment compared with waiting for full retirement age. Full retirement age is 66 for people born between 1943 and 1954, and retirement age phases up to age 67 for people born in 1960 or after.
If you were born in 1960 or later, you'll be penalized 30% for taking Social Security before full retirement age, and all reductions are permanent. If you delay taking your benefits past full retirement age, then you receive an 8% increase for each full year that you do so, up until you reach 70, at which point the increases stop.
Every individual can calculate their own “full retirement age” based on their specific birthday to help you consider how you can lock in the maximum amount of Social Security benefits.
8%
The amount that your monthly Social Security benefit increases for each year that you delay taking benefits past full retirement age (until you reach age 70, at which point the increases stop).
The Application Process
Applying for Social Security benefits is a fairly simple process. Applications can be submitted online, over the phone, or in person at your local Social Security office. Appointments are strongly encouraged.
The most convenient way to apply is through the online platform found on the Social Security Administration (SSA) website. The application itself takes about 10 to 30 minutes and can be saved at any point for future completion. Also, this application can be used to apply for Medicare.
It is generally recommended that you apply a few months in advance of when you would like to start receiving the checks. To ensure a quick and easy application process, it is best to have all the necessary information on hand before beginning. This can include but is not necessarily limited to the birth and marriage dates of you and your spouse, your Social Security number, proof of citizenship, tax information, employment history, military records, and bank account information for direct deposit.
Requests for Documents
Sometimes there are requests for documents, including original birth certificates, marriage licenses, and tax returns. An agent usually contacts you if any clarification or additional documentation is needed. An agent may also let you know if you are eligible to receive more money through another person’s account, such as a spouse, and if anyone else is eligible to receive benefits under your account.
Once you have completed your application and supplied all requested information, you are given a receipt for your records and a confirmation number that you can use to check the status of your application online after submission. You can also follow up over the phone or in person at your local Social Security office. Depending on your situation and what documentation may be required, your application may be approved within the same month as when you apply.
Payment Schedules
In addition, benefit payment schedules are now dictated by date of birth. For those with birthdays from the first to the 10th of the month, payments will be made on the second Wednesday of every month. For those born from the 11th to the 20th, payment is made on the third Wednesday of the month. For those born from the 21st to the 31st, payments are made on the fourth Wednesday of the month.
This means that if you turn 62 on Dec. 15, then your first payment will arrive on the third Wednesday of the following February. If your birthday is Dec. 15 and you are already over age 62, then your first payment should arrive on the third Wednesday of the month following the month when you apply. If you’re already on Social Security or receive both Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments, then you may receive them on a different date.
PR Newswire
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 9, 2023
Company also launches Bionic Events and upgraded dashboard capabilities to help customers discover, scan, and inventory enterprise-grade cloud applications
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- , the industry's first Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, today at announced a series of new product innovations to help enterprises manage application risk in production. Bionic has introduced a new ServiceNow® Service Graph Connector that provides engineering and security teams with a real-time configuration management database (CMDB) of their cloud applications, microservices, and dependencies in production. This capability fills a critical gap for organizations who need an accurate up-to-date inventory of their cloud application dependencies. The company also announced Bionic Events, a feature that correlates application changes to overall security risk; and enhanced dashboard capabilities to provide an instant status of an organization's application security posture.
According to , high-performing development teams ship code multiple times per day on average, but security teams struggle to secure cloud-based applications at the same pace of innovation. As a result, many business-critical risks go undetected and unresolved for weeks, months – or forever. To solve this, Bionic's industry-leading ASPM platform uses a lightweight, agentless approach to scan and analyze cloud applications at scale, giving development and security teams 10x more visibility into all attack surfaces and top business-critical risks running in production, while eliminating 95% of the noise that data, alerts, and security tools emit.
"With new code being pushed into production several times each day, applications are becoming harder to fully understand, secure, and operate. The biggest challenge for any enterprise is having full visibility into those applications with an accurate, real-time inventory that they can trust," said Eyal Mamo, co-founder and CTO of Bionic. "We are proud to evolve our platform to meet the challenges that today's developers and security professionals face, and to partner with industry leaders like ServiceNow to provide every company control over their application security posture."
Bionic Connector for ServiceNow Service Graph
By joining the program, Bionic will help customers quickly, easily, and reliably load third-party data into the system, enabling data quality, timeliness, and scalability. Bionic's Service Graph Connector allows customers to enrich their existing ServiceNow CMDB with a real-time accurate model of all their application dependencies so they can better secure and manage their cloud applications.
"ServiceNow is leading the future of work by creating great experiences for businesses," said Michael Ludwig, VP Data Foundations at ServiceNow. "We are pleased to have Bionic integrate its Service Graph Connector to help further enhance satisfaction, build trust, accelerate time to value, and reduce risk for our joint customers."
"As security and information technology teams work to break down data silos and enhance visibility into the enterprise, it's critical that organizations adopt unified helpdesk ticketing and IT management workflow systems," said Ken Buckler, Research Director of Information Security, Risk and Compliance Management at Enterprise Management Associates. "By integrating with a single workflow platform for IT, security, and application developers, organizations can realize enhanced productivity and foster better communication between these interconnected components which are so critical to business success."
Bionic Events
In today's highly complex, distributed environments, applications are constantly changing and not all changes are thoroughly tested or vetted prior to release. According to Google Cloud and DORA's 2022 report, even when changes are vetted, organizations have change failure rates — anywhere from 15% to 60% — that expose them to risk. To solve this, Bionic Events shows customers how applications are changing and the risk associated with those changes.
The Bionic platform tracks when application services and artifacts change — added, removed, or modified — and then analyzes how that change impacts the overall security risk posture. Now customers can search, filter, and investigate specific events right from the Events page. Additionally, Bionic's Events Time Frame feature allows customers to visualize how changes have affected their application security posture over a specified period of time.
Bionic ASPM Dashboard
Modern security teams are inundated with tools, data, and alerts, most of which are neither relevant nor actionable. Bionic's new dashboard helps security teams focus on the insights that matter for managing their overall application security posture. Users will find an at-a-glance overview of their application services, deployment stack, and potential exposures. They will also find a new variety of filters and interactive widgets that help teams better manage, prioritize, and remediate threats.
Today's innovations – the Bionic-Service Graph integration, Bionic Events, and ASPM dashboard – are generally available. For more information, check out the or request a . If attending Black Hat USA, stop by the Bionic booth #2840, August 9-10 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, to learn more about ASPM.
About Bionic
Bionic is an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform that proactively reduces security, data privacy, and operational risk by continuously analyzing the entire architecture of applications as they evolve and change in production. Unlike cloud security posture offerings, Bionic provides deep visibility into the application layer to help organizations manage the risk of their services, APIs, dependencies, and data flows in production. Bionic was founded in 2019 by Idan Ninyo and Eyal Mamo and is based out of Palo Alto, CA.
ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
Media Contact
Francesca DeAnda
SOURCE Bionic
Industry leaders across the board are waking up to the critical importance of automation. More than two-thirds of companies are at least piloting the automation of business processes in one or more business units, a accurate survey by McKinsey & Company1 revealed.
Deloitte’s 2020 research by Deloitte last year found that the majority of artificial intelligence (AI) adopters believe that AI will substantially transform both their own organisation and industry within the next three years.
All of this is driven by our need for exceptional experiences, both as customers and as employees. Research shows2 that highly automated companies are more likely to post higher revenue growth and their employees are more likely to be satisfied. This makes finding ways to augment the workforce with new digital technologies both a challenge and an opportunity.
However, as IT expert Thomas Davenport points out3, it is no straightforward process: But it can be difficult to determine which technology is best for which kind of work, how to effectively pair humans and machines as colleagues, and how to achieve the maximum level of value from these complex collaboration.
For business process outsourcing company Capita, turning over the service desk and first-line support to bots was a way of freeing up human engineers for value-add tasks.
Capita undertook the largest company-wide automation project in the UK, carefully designed to benefit both customers and employees by automating high-volume, repetitive processes using bots and virtual assistants, allowing its people to focus on more high-value service tasks. Real-time metrics also make it possible for Capita and its customers to monitor processes.
But there’s an important distinction to be made between what is automated and what is connected, says Chris Pope, Global VP of Innovation at ServiceNow, a digital workflow solutions company. “If you think about those buzzwords of digital and transformation — digital is the ‘stuff’ but the transformation part is hard because I am asking you to change how you work — and the danger is that it becomes totally dehumanised.”
The answer, says Pope, is to make sure it’s not only about the technology, but also about the journey. “It’s about understanding the moments that matter,” he says. “If I have a question, it could be something with no real emotion involved, such as not being able to send an email or work my printer. IT can fix it. But what if it’s a sensitive issue, such as payroll or mental health, or I’m struggling with my workload? You have to map out these journeys too.” Ideally, Pope says, “I’d be chatting with a bot and the bot would say, ‘I need to get this in the hands of someone with empathy in an HR centre’.” Ultimately, he says, “what we want at every step is acknowledgement that someone is working on the problem appropriately.”
This sort of connection in the workplace is vital for the next generation of talent, says Pope. “Most organisations have lots of technology and have had it for a while, but it’s the journey through it that matters. When you get an app on your phone, you don’t read the instructions or training. It just works. But think about the last time something was launched in the workplace and the hoops you had to jump through.”
Workplace connectivity matters to the newer generations more than ever before, says Pope, “They’ve grown up on a mobile device. If it doesn’t work on a mobile or on the move, they’re going to wonder how on earth work gets done. Because of our consumer experiences we expect things to work and be simple and intuitive.”
And with the Covid-19 pandemic giving rise to a new kind of hybrid workplace, where work/life balance is prioritised, it’s even more vital: “We don’t live to work anymore and there’s a real reluctance to go backwards.”
The pandemic has also enabled faster change than anyone believed possible: “A lot of customers have deployed things in months that would have taken two or three years before,” says Pope. “We have lost protracted review cycles or the luxury of debating all day.”
Pope believes that the new connected workplace will become a driver for talent. “It used to be an employer decision, but employees have the power now. If a company doesn’t allow working from home three or four days a week then the talent will go elsewhere.”
How does this feed into the bottom line? It’s simple. “If you take the friction and complexity away, things get done,” says Pope. “You have happier employees and more productive working in a way that benefits their lives. It isn’t that automation gives us more time, it’s that we are switched on to use it more wisely.
Find out more about ServiceNow
View Footnotes
1 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-imperatives-for-automation-success
2 https://workflow.servicenow.com/it-transformation/digital-workflows-worth
3 https://workflow.servicenow.com/quarterly/issue/1/section2/
*. FROM MCKINSEY REPORT: This year’s research finds that successful organizations now consider the human elements of these efforts in three ways. First, they consider and build the automation-related capabilities of their personnel. Respondents from these organizations are more likely than others to say their organizations make addressing potential automation-related skill gaps a top five priority. These respondents are also more than twice as likely as others to identify employee training and capability building as one of the primary reasons for their organization’s automation success. Second, successful organizations also gather individuals’ expertise and embed it in the design of automation solutions. Respondents reporting success are much more likely than others to say their companies scale up their automation programs by using “human in the loop” solutions—that is, training automation platforms with people’s input over time. Finally, successful organizations prioritize communication across the organization while implementing automation-related changes. Respondents from companies with successful efforts are seven times more likely than others to say they formally involve the communications function while implementing automation efforts, and they are more than twice as likely to say the HR function is involved.
Jim Ivers and Natasha Gupta of Synopsys discuss customer challenges with application security. They talk about consolidation as a way to reduce complexity and boost security; Ivers and Gupta also explain how application security posture management (ASPM) can help with consolidation and maximize its benefits. The two Synopsys representatives also examine how applications software consolidation can help reduce an organization’s level of risk.
About the Speakers: Natasha is a Senior Security Solutions Manager at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, driving go-to-market strategy for Software Risk Manager, an ASPM solution. She has worked for ten years in the cybersecurity and enterprise networking space. Prior to Synopsys, Natasha was with ServiceNow, where she managed product marketing initiatives for ServiceNow Security Operations, a SOAR platform for incident and vulnerability management. She has also held previous roles in product marketing and software product management at Imperva and A10 Networks.
Jim Ivers is the vice president of marketing for the Software Integrity Group at Synopsys. Jim joins us from Cigital, where he was the chief marketing officer and led all aspects of Cigital’s global marketing strategies, branding initiatives, and programs as well as product management and product marketing.
Jim is a 30-year technology veteran who has spent the last 10 years in IT security. Prior to Cigital, Jim was the chief marketing officer at companies including Covata, Triumfant, Vovici, and Cybertrust, a $200M security solutions provider that was sold to Verizon Business. Jim has also served as vice president of marketing for webMethods and vice president of product management for Information Builders.
Jim holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida.
Applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits has always been a complicated process. But like everything else in our lives right now, COVID-19 has made it even more difficult.
With Social Security Administration (SSA) offices closed nationwide, wait times via phone are averaging 90 minutes, and the backlog of people waiting for this critical income is growing by the day.
With that in mind, here are some expert tips to help you best navigate the SSDI benefits process as efficiently and quickly as possible during the pandemic.
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1. Don’t wait to apply.
The biggest mistake that applicants make when applying for SSDI is waiting to apply. On average, people wait 7.6 months after the onset of a disability to apply for benefits, and considering that more than 2 million people applied for SSDI last year, waiting now could come with serious, time-consuming consequences.
Already, there are nearly 600,000 people waiting for a decision at the initial application level, where it takes four to six months for someone to receive a yes or no. About two-thirds of applicants are denied at the application level, often due to technical errors. This leads to longer waits through the appeals process.
If this happens to you, the good news is that you can appeal for a reconsideration of your claim. The bad news is that a second denial leaves you no choice but to go before an administrative law judge for a hearing, a process that has an average wait time of more than 400 days.
2. Work with an expert disability representative.
As alluded to earlier, the SSDI application and appeals process can require months to years for receiving a decision from the SSA, depending on the details of someone’s claim. Making a mistake can be costly.
Fortunately, there are experts who know the ins and outs of the SSDI process by heart. They can guide applicants through the requirements and help them find out whether they are likely to qualify before they even attempt to start the process of information gathering required for the application.
Should you qualify, an expert disability representative can potentially help shorten the time it takes to get approved by:
- Collecting and submitting the detailed and accurate information required by the SSA.
- Communicating with the SSA on your behalf.
- Identifying important facets of your claim that are specific to your experience with disability and providing the evidence SSA needs.
- Monitoring the status of your claim and appeals.
Finding an expert SSDI representative is important to your claim because it can often lead to a quicker path to approval, avoiding an appeal, and a lower representation fee. For example, some representatives help individuals to apply and then assist with appeals if they’re denied. Other representatives only help with appeals or the hearing. Representatives typically provide details online about their approach, how successful they are, how many customers they’ve helped to receive SSDI, and whether they focus primarily on SSDI representation.
3. Continue to keep your options open for returning to work someday.
Many people do not apply for SSDI because they see it as giving up on their working career. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, the SSDI program could provide you with the important financial relief and the pathway back to working again in the future.
It is true that unemployment for people with disabilities is historically higher than the unemployment rate for those without disabilities. And COVID-19’s effect on the economy has brought new challenges for all job seekers. In May 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 17.9%, and for those without disabilities unemployment was at 12.8%.
But the majority of people we help want to return to work when medically able. The additional value of the SSDI program is giving people a starting point, a place to begin when considering the return to work.
The SSA’s free Ticket to Work program is available to anyone receiving SSDI, and connects them to SSA-certified Employment Networks to streamline the return-to-work process by matching capable workers with employers who need their unique skill sets and talent. The program protects benefits during a Trial Work Period while people test their ability to return to work after their health condition. (For more, please read How to Go Back to Work When You’re on Disability.)
COVID-19 is bringing new obstacles for everyone, but people with disabilities are at an even greater disadvantage when it comes time to apply for benefits. Knowing there are supports and resources available to help can make a world of difference.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that was commonly known as Food Stamps has been one of the most important welfare programs in the country for decades. But not every American gets approved despite applying for it, they need to meet certain criteria and they are often denied due to different reasons. Americans who are struggling to make ends meet are the ones who often get into this program ar at least apply for it. Right now, American society is going through one of the toughest economic moments in modenr history and these programs are what keep them from falling apart. But people who get denied have a very specific question about these SNAP Benefits that we are in a position to answer.
Folks who gets denied the SNAP Benefits often fall under the idea that they can no longer apply for them. This is a misconception that we need to clear because they can still apply for these benefits despite getting denied. Any person can be found ineligible for any program and they can easily get their application denied. The reason for it varies but participation can still remain desired and people can still apply for the benefits. Anybody who is denied can still apply for benefits at a later date. Everybody is within their right to reapply at any given time. Also, there is a way to appeal when you are denied the application.
Getting denied is not uncommon either, you can still appeal for it and get your application accepted for SNAP Benefits. Most of these application decisions tend to be correct but the denial can still happen due to an unintentional mistake. Although the process can be stressful for older people, it can be extremely beneficial if you depend on those food stamps to survive. Some of the reasons for getting denied are a disallowed citizenship status, state residency restrictions, excessive income and assets, failure to meet work requirements, or an incomplete verification process.
